Food: Mostly Outside the Loop

As the holiday season arrives, we all have a little reprieve from the busy slate of art openings, lectures, performances and other events. I have used this mini-break to do something I started this past summer, which is to branch outside of my immediate Montrose/Rice Village area. My trips started with an attempt to work through Alison Cook’s list of top 100 restaurants and expanded to include trips to shops and grocery stores in strip centers based on recommendations from coworkers and friends.

A guide to Houston posted a couple of years ago by Andrea Grover points out that people in the arts often host visitors, and we are basically tour guides to some of the city’s hidden gems. Houstonites also happen to be living in the most ethnically diverse city in the nation (according to Rice University’s Kinder Institute report). But unlike being able to walk a city block of New York, these pockets are ripped apart and require some research, definitely an iPhone map and a lot of driving.

Here are some highlights from my past year, documented by my obsessive iPhone photo-taking. My choices are probably based on the food as much on my memory of the simple fun of the experience itself. I have only lived in Houston for about six years, and I am sure some of these places are already well known spots for the art community. So PLEASE post suggestions for where to go in 2013 in the comments.

Also, here’s a google map to visualize the lay of the land. You’ll see that the first few places here are still technically in the loop, and I have not ventured out to the south or east of Houston enough. But here we go…

Joshua Fischer works as the assistant curator at Rice University Art Gallery, where he's curated installations by Andrea Dezsö, Ana Serrano, and Yasuaki Onishi. He graduated from Trinity University where he double majored in Studio Art and Sociology. He then received an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.